Bangladesh's young population (under 25) that mounts up to 50 percent of its total population is a vast untapped wealth that could be turned into the most effective and potential manpower of the country. Born mostly of poor parents, the male children supplement the poor parents' meager income, while many of the female children work as domestic helps and the unfortunate of them are either engaged inside the country in anti-social works or trafficked outside the country to work as sex workers. Even after the promulgation of child-labour ordinance, a good many of the male children labour in factories and fields until affected by diseases while working with toxic chemicals in some of these factories.
Bereft of food, education and shelter, many of them wander homeless in the streets of big cities and towns surviving by begging and thieving. They die by hundreds every day of easily preventable diseases like malaria, measles, whooping cough, diarrhea and jaundice. They are the most disadvantaged group of the total population. The neglect of these youngsters by the society and last of all by the government is most depressing. Reports carried by the newspapers recently indicated that 11 children both male and female abducted from the Bihari colony at Mirpur were rescued by the police on August 26 last and returned to their parents. Report carried by The Daily Star on August 12 last indicated that BDR arrested two human traffickers from Rajshahi border and rescued 17 men and women aged between 2 and 55 while being trafficked to India. The grim story they narrated after they were rescued by the police made it clear that chill penury and lack of employment opportunities inside the country had driven them to look for a living outside the country.
As these children grow in absence of opportunities for education and work, their derailment and drift towards evil association and criminality go unabated. Drug addiction, extortion, beating, rape and even murder are the images of violent crimes associated with the most depraved individuals. Sensible citizens are shocked to hear of the atrocities committed by these innocent looking boys and even some girls who have turned into mobsters, hijackers and drug pushers. Unhappily, some atrocious crimes in the country are now being committed by those who should be most innocent. Drug addiction and drug trafficking have increased to an extent that sensible citizenry could never conceive in earlier times. The number of addicts in the country, it is now known through a survey of UNDP and other NGOs, has swelled to 20 lakh from 10 lakh in 1996.
Over the years hundreds and thousands of poor people in the age group 15 to 30 have flocked to the capital city in search of work and a better life. Few found either and packed themselves into shanties and crowded localities. Shockingly true, many of the most desperate turned to crime to make a living working under the protection of some very influential godfathers who operate this clandestine business but have always evaded arrest allegedly because of high connection and money dealings.
Our failure to delve deep into this tenuous issue and grapple with it properly might explode into a catastrophic situation. This will mean turning the country into a snow-capped volcano -- pretty and calm on top but seething within. A silent revolution resulting from simmering discontent that is brewing up may, in no time, throw us all into a web of danger.
How do we fight shy of the problem that warrants our attention most? What a horrifying drudgery and waste of human energy at the prime of one's life due to lack of economic protection, guidance and motivation? Sleeping in railway stations and bus terminals and picking through garbage dumps and sifting for food in the municipal dump and hotel corners!
Juvenile crime in Bangladesh has exploded in recent years along with organised crimes by local youth gangs. Punishment is often meted out to the offenders but when they are released, they go back to the families which are not better than what they left. The situation has reached such a nadir that poor parents, sometime indulging in crimes themselves, encourage their children to work as couriers. With crime woven into the fabric of the society, the nation has every reason to be wary. Recent weeks have brought news of two particularly brutal acts : gang rape and murder of peace loving citizens protesting the drug trafficking business. In the last week of August a young pregnant house wife Lipi Begum (20) in the Pallabi area of the city was killed by the deviant youth gangs as she protested the drug dealing and drug taking near her house.
While analysing the present pathetic situation, we are led to believe that it is the government's failure in the past days to create opportunities for education and work that has pushed them to take up such criminal activities, in most cases as a way for living. On the other hand these crimes have awakened the country to the beast that has broken loose in its young people.
However, with resources gobbled up by some self-seeking politicians and opportunist business syndicates and the government machinery vacillating and adrift, the country can't get rid of the dreaded scourges like disease and poverty. This leads the grotesque problem and violent nature of the youngsters crippling the growth of the nation.
With climate change causing heavy rainfall in unusual times and increasing frequency and intensity of flood that ultimately affects food security, the country now faces the worst of times. Experts in a media workshop held in the city on August 29 last suggested the formulation of a comprehensive action plan which will have to be friendly to both environment and infrastructure for sustainable development. This is the time to show that we live in a globalised world and share each other's suffering and pain. Developed countries in the West should allow their surplus fund to flow into the poverty-stricken countries like Bangladesh for the emancipation, education, food security and healthcare of the less fortunate and unfortunate people in this region. This would help people allowing their youngsters an access to better living and education.
Political leaders and people belonging to all shades of opinion in the country must wake up to the fact that the time for reckoning has arrived. If the country has to rise up from the quagmire of past neglect, has to prosper and carve out a self-sustaining future, then it should not have a lacklustre education system or an infrastructure that is falling apart. It should not have its people being turned away by hospitals because they don't have money or dying in the street corner of drug overdoses or becoming victims of random crime because they were 'in the wrong place in the wrong time'.
The great society we had dreamt of, meaning a social fabric free of the vile scourges of disease, poverty, corruption and illiteracy and cherished it to come into being, since the days of liberation war has not come to pass. We are aware of our problems. But we are not keen to solve them with courage, conviction, patriotic feeling and proper planning.
Drug addiction and drug trafficking among youths are eating into the vitals of the nation. Many of these disgruntled youngsters are resorting to unethical and illegal means of earning a living because of the lack of opportunities of doing anything else. We have a whole generation of human beings who could be so productive and helpful but are being lost. Reports published in the national dailies in the recent past indicated that hundreds and thousands of Bangladeshi youths after paying a big sum of money to manpower agents could not get the job they were promised and were languishing in jails of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Malaysia. If the country could have provided them a simple job, they would not have either slipped into crimes inside the country or gone abroad by selling their last belongings like land and jewelry.
Within the country the drug trade and 'contract killing' have in many cases become the last options for these disgruntled youths. These crimes, perhaps obviously, have shown them that in a little time they can make a lot of money and they have accepted it. Government effort in the past days to root out criminal activities of 'Oggan party and Malam party' as well as drug trafficking, vandalism and child trafficking" has been far from satisfactory other than what RAB has been doing at the present moment.
The way the whole country is plunging into chaos, because of the apathy and neglect shown towards the vital section of the society signals a potential calamity for the nation. In fact, the country has inherited decades of benign neglect, misplaced priorities and outright incompetence at every level. Small wonder, alleged corruption of politicians and administrative cadres in the government circles and widening economic and social fissures in the body politic of the nation have soured the disadvantaged groups on the political class who so long ruled the country.
At this hour of crisis and need, sensible leaders irrespective of their affiliations have to come forward to heal the rifts developing between groups and lead them in building a new society based on equal rights and opportunity.

Md. Asadullah Khan is a former teacher of physics and Controller of Examinations, BUET.